Hitachi storage technologies support mission-critical virtual desktop infrastructure at Seattle Children's Hospital.

1. S U C C E S S S T O R Y
“When we virtualized behind Seattle Children’s
the Virtual Storage Platform, INDUSTRY Healthcare
we gained a single centralized
licensing center, one set of SOLUTIONS Enterprise Platform, File and Content, Modular Platform
tools to manage tasks and one Hardware — Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, Hitachi Adaptable
Modular Storage 2100, Hitachi NAS Platform 3080, powered by
refined, enterprise-ready repli-
BlueArc®
cation solution — one platform Software — Hitachi Dynamic Tiering, Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager,
to do it all. ” Hitachi Command Suite, Hitachi Tuning Manager
Services — Planning, design and deployment services provided by
Richard Carter Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution Services
Lead Storage Engineer
Seattle Children’s

2. S U C C E S S S T O R Y 2
subspecialties. These include all flavors of
At the Heart of Seattle Children’s Mission-critical VDI Microsoft Windows, IBM® AIX® and z/OS®,
Linux, OpenVMS, XenServer and VMware.
Deployment Pump Hitachi Storage Technologies Additionally, IT manages a 5,500-strong
personal computer environment and the
Seattle Children’s is a highly specialized hospital, research and data for the hospital’s overarching opera-
foundation group responsible for saving lives and improving health- tional systems, including Cerner clinical,
Epic revenue and patient systems, GE pic-
care for children. To ensure reliability for its 24/7 virtual desktop ture archiving and communication systems
infrastructure (VDI) deployment, Seattle Children’s relies on the (PACS), and Microsoft Exchange Server.
The organization has a primary data center
centralized simplicity, performance and versatility of Hitachi Virtual as well as a smaller center used for proof-
Storage Platform and Hitachi NAS Platform*1. of-concept efforts and disaster recovery.
When the IT department embarked upon
Three words capture the focus of Seattle physicians and medical professionals, and an enterprise-wide VDI strategy, the goal
Children’s: hope, care, cure. For more than functions as the primary teaching, clinical was to incorporate best-of-class hardware,
100 years, the hospital has specialized in and research site for top ranked University of software and networking gear to ensure
meeting the unique physical, emotional Washington School of Medicine's Department a flawless deployment. Cisco SAN switch
and developmental needs of children, of Pediatrics. fabrics, including Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer
from infancy through young adulthood. Directors, and end-to-end Citrix VDI com-
Ranked among America’s best children’s Wanted: Best-of-class VDI ponents from hypervisor to virtual image,
hospitals by U.S. News & Word Report Deployment including XenDesktop and XenServer, lay the
magazine, Seattle Children’s provides Seattle Children’s is an exceedingly pro- foundation for a high-performance virtu-
world-class clinical care with nearly 60 gressive healthcare organization, delivering alization environment. As it came time to con-
pediatric subspecialties, and is internation- the utmost critical services and diag- sider storage, the IT department needed to
ally recognized for pioneering pediatric nostics. Ensuring uninterrupted access replace a legacy storage system with newer
medical research and achieving extensive to its information is equally vital. Patient technologies, simpler administration and the
grant funding. records, cutting-edge research data and highest I/O available.
With a 254-bed facility in Seattle, Washington, transactional accounts must be available
“When we jumped with both feet into
as well as several additional outlying care and anywhere, anytime across this constantly
this level of critical VDI project, we went
research locations, Seattle Children's serves changing and growing healthcare entity.
with the best in class for all components,
a 4-state area. Expansion plans will bring a The IT department at Seattle Children’s including storage. We wanted to look
new hospital wing by 2013 with another 80 supports more than 800 server systems, at storage from a ‘greenfield’ perspec-
beds for cancer and critical care patients both physical and virtual, and applications tive: a targeted, uncomplicated solution
and a new Emergency Department. Seattle dedicated to the unique nature of medical that would deliver rock-solid reliability for
Children's employs over 4,900 highly trained
1
Hitachi NAS Platform is powered by BlueArc®, which was recently acquired by Hitachi Data Systems.
“We wanted to look at storage from a ‘greenfield’ perspective: a
targeted, uncomplicated solution that would deliver rock-solid
reliability for the VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] initiative as
well as future data growth.”
Wes Wright
Vice President and CTO
Seattle Children’s

3. S U C C E S S S T O R Y 3
the VDI initiative as well as future data A Healthy VDI Initiative move data throughout virtual tiered storage
growth. We chose Hitachi Data Systems for block, file and content data. Combined
Seattle Children’s installed Hitachi Virtual
for outstanding reliability, performance, with Hitachi Command Suite v7, which de-
Storage Platform in its primary data center
technologies and price,” says Wes Wright, livers a comprehensive management suite
to function as the centralized storage solu-
vice president and chief technology officer for this environment, VSP helps Seattle
tion. A portion of this centralized storage
at Seattle Children’s. Children’s unify and simplify administrative
is delivered via a dual-node Hitachi NAS
tasks across the storage enterprise for the
Platform (HNAS) 3080 cluster. To simplify
Superior Solution Simplifies and highest levels of operational efficiency.
the Seattle Children’s Citrix VDI server
Unifies Storage environment, which requires both block “Now, we can scale extensively and sim-
Hitachi Data Systems became the storage (SAN) and file (NAS) based storage, HNAS ply, going deep by externalizing storage,
partner of choice for Seattle Children’s VDI 3080 provides the dual-enterprise support wide with our drive count and up for per-
endeavor only after thorough and meticu- capability via a single platform. formance with the capabilities of the pro-
lous investigation of potential solutions. cessors. And the Virtual Storage Platform
The IT team at Seattle Children’s spent “Citrix uses its own provisioning services
lets us go to very granular levels so we can
time talking with Gartner senior analysts, to handle read images. This creates a pool
grow as needed and better meet planning
making reference calls and engaging of servers, but not a cluster, so we had all
horizons and grow to meet future needs,”
Advanced Systems Group to further vet these discrete servers. We wanted a file
says Wright.
possible choices and vendors. Advanced service device in place to read a common
Systems Group is a national open systems image rather than read from each server. To further orchestrate a highly efficient data
integrator and consulting services com- The HNAS 3080 offered us very high pattern for VDI access, Seattle Children’s
pany that focuses on providing customized performance and reliability to present read had its VSP configured with varying
and comprehensive solutions for Fortune images and really simplifies administration performance-level disks, including SAS
500 companies with mission-critical busi- of those shared images,” Carter says. for mostly supporting the HNAS-to-Citrix
ness applications. servers, and solid state disks (SSD) to
The Seattle Children’s VDI implementa-
sustain hot blocks for the most frequently
Seattle Children’s selected Hitachi Virtual tion will eventually reach 5,000 users. To
accessed data. “At this level of data stor-
Storage Platform (VSP), an economically date, 2,000 thin client and zero client VDI
age demands, there could be hundreds
superior storage architecture designed devices have been deployed. As each
of hard disks required to service all the
to swiftly address dynamic data environ- virtual desktop device boots up, it pings
performance requirements. Using Dynamic
ments with one platform and many cost VSP in the primary data center to obtain its
Tiering, we were able to create a very ef-
efficiencies. “The Hitachi solution was able virtual image.
ficient and suitable mix of storage disk on
to meet all our needs for the VDI project At its secondary location, Seattle the Virtual Storage Platform to substantially
as well as the larger vision for centralized Children’s installed a VSP in front of a reduce the cost per virtual desktop while
storage and disaster recovery. We wanted Hitachi Adaptable Modular Storage 2100 ensuring optimized data access across the
the potential for data center consolidation, (AMS 2100). This allows storage to con- VDI user environment,” says Carter.
the ability to reduce management tools nect through the VSP and access the vir-
and a way to seriously uncomplicate the Seattle Children’s is also using path-aware
tualization layer, thereby facilitating a single
storage environment,” says Wright. Hitachi Tuning Manager for end-to-end
common replication solution for address-
visibility and performance management, to
Hitachi Data Systems Global Solution ing disaster recovery. Hitachi Universal
view status, create daily reports and stay
Services was involved in the planning and Replicator software assists with simplified
atop expansion thresholds. “Tuning Manager
design of the storage solution and help- asynchronous data replication across
keeps us very much apprised of current
ing with the virtual desktop deployment. internal and externally attached storage
situations, so we know where the VDI is at
“The Hitachi staff helped with disk layout, for resilient business continuity without
any given time. Testing had shown that each
usage, designing dynamic pools and tier- the need for redundant servers or replica-
virtualized desktop consumes about 12 I/O:
ing, configuration, storage virtualization, tion appliances.
that’s about 12,000 I/O per 1,000 machines.
and [they] provided top-notch knowledge Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform provides We will grow to 6,000 virtual desktops, and
transfer for all the software features,” adds 3-dimensional scaling to dynamically this Hitachi environment gives us confidence
Richard Carter, lead storage engineer for scale up, out and deep. VSP uses Hitachi that we’ll have no problems sustaining VDI,”
Seattle Children’s. Dynamic Tiering to manage external stor- Carter furthers.
age resources as a whole and dynamically

4. S U C C E S S S T O R Y
Hitachi Tiered Storage Manager joins the to our end users and the Hitachi package is as maintenance and cost containment,
software lineup on VSP for easy execution definitely part of that success,” says Wright. and about 50% less footprint, cooling and
of volume-based movement of data accord- power consumption costs, along with 65%
“And of course data storage continues to
ing to policy and value, helping to optimize less for the AMS 2100. And since we now
grow, and keeping up always has its chal-
storage utilization. “We don’t always know have centralized storage operations through
lenges. We anticipate 35% storage data
exactly what a new system might need. Tiered the VSP, we don’t have to hire additional
growth per year, stored in state, and we’re
Storage Manager allows us to adapt to the storage staff. We’re doing far more work
heading toward half a petabyte of managed
final requirements of the system and make with fewer resources. We’re also able to put
storage. Before the Hitachi solution, we had
adjustments throughout the system’s lifespan. highest performance where we need it, and
to manage the licensing of different software
With current storage, we might later need to everything else on a more affordable tier,”
in different places, managing discrete solu-
move it to or from mission-critical storage he details.
tions and new feature sets, and wanted to
tiers, or adjust the performance and avail-
get away from that model. When we virtual- Carter considers the storage environment to
ability as roles change. It only takes a couple
ized behind the Virtual Storage Platform, we still be in a transitional period, as migrations
of minutes to schedule migrations between
gained a single centralized licensing center, are completing and other initiatives are in
AMS 2100 and VSP internal storage, or to go
one set of tools to manage tasks and one flight. “We have all of these next-generation
from midrange quality to Tier 1 performance,”
refined enterprise-ready replication solution technologies and feature sets under an
Carter continues.
— one platform to do it all,” adds Carter. overarching storage umbrella. This allows
us to operate a Tier 1, very highly avail-
One Platform, Many Efficiencies From a cost-efficiency perspective, Carter
able device many times easier than we did
Since deploying the Hitachi solution, the cites a lower total cost of ownership for
before. And we haven’t yet begun to realize
Seattle Children’s IT department has already the Hitachi products than other solutions
the full potential of the benefits provided by
realized many of its goals. “We wanted to considered. “We embedded the storage
the Virtual Storage Platform,” he concludes.
ensure that we could operate a dynamic requisition in the overall VDI project costs,
24/7 environment with zero disruptions to and the return on investment for the VSP
our customers. With the previous environ- has shown very well. But the biggest returns
ment, it was such a coordination effort to so far have been on operational costs, such
handle the effects of change. Now, we have
a highly resilient and efficient IT enterprise
that allows us to take on big changes
without the worry of sustaining them. The
VDI implementation has had a huge impact
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© Hitachi Data Systems Corporation 2012. All Rights Reserved. SS-331-A DG January 2012